World War II Database

Booby traps accounted for a very small fraction of casualties during WW2. For example, official United States statistics noted that 0.2% of the deaths and 0.5% of the injuries were caused by booby traps. Nevertheless, from a psychological and morale point of view, booby traps caused a great amount of unquantifiable damage. The thought that the enemy might have booby trapped every seemingly typical item, for example, might cause an unit to move slower than what they were capable of, as they were spending the effort to carefully avoiding booby traps that might or might not had been there. Although rather few and far in between, a death or a serious injury caused by a booby trap might shake a group of soldiers for days to come.

In the title World War II Axis Booby Traps and Sabotage Tactics, veteran military history author Gordon Rottman researched many WW2-era Allied intelligence bulletins in an attempt to provide a detailed overview of German, Italian, and Japanese practices when it came to the topic of laying down traps in attempt to maim or demoralize Allied troops. Although the bulk of the book was edited versions of previously published text, the author did a great job organizing the data collected, and offered his own analysis on the information obtained from the bulletins. The information he collected and presented were so complete for certain topics that he felt compelled to devote the second page and part of the third page of the main portion of the book to a disclaimer, warning that the book was meant to be a historical reference, and readers should not attempt to manufacture any devices described in the book. An example of the level of detail that the book went into could be seen in the quoted passage below.

One item that I wish he had done was to also present information about booby traps from the Axis perspective. While the book went in length about the kind of booby traps Allied troops encountered in France and Italy, for example, I felt that it would be extremely useful to hear the experiences of the German troops who had laid these booby traps. What had gone through their minds as they tried to predict where an Allied infantryman might step? When assembling the booby traps, were they in as much risk as Allied engineers who were later tasked to disarm them? Those were questions in my mind that I hope to have answered. In follow-up title by Rottman in the coming years, perhaps.

World War II Axis Booby Traps and Sabotage Tactics offered me a different perspective of the war, not one that I regularly see when researching WW2 topics. For that alone, the book gets a "thumb up" from me. Despite my disappointment for the lack of the Axis point of view, this book is still worth browsing for those who are interested in the ground war.